Mephistopheles

Between nine and ten at night, at a crossroads in the Spesser Forest outside Wittenberg, a scholar scratched circles into the dirt with the end of his staff and waited. The wind arrived first, then the lightning, and then something that took its time about choosing a shape. It came as a dragon, fell as a flame, gathered into a burning globe, and let out a man made of fire who ran the outer edge of the circle faster than anything with legs. When it finally stopped moving it was wearing the grey habit of a friar. It was also, by then, extremely polite.

That is the entrance of Mephostophiles in the book that made him, a chapbook of Faust stories printed at Frankfurt am Main by Johann Spies in 1587. The author never signed it. Whoever he was, he did something unusual for a devil-writer of his century: rather than reach into the long inherited stock of demon names, he built a new one out of Greek and Latin scraps and handed it to a devil nobody had ever conjured. The name has no earlier life. It is not in the grimoires that came before it, not in the sermons, not in the trial records. Outside the magic manuals later fathered onto Faust himself, it appears essentially in literature and nowhere else.

The pieces of the name are Greek at both ends and a puzzle in the middle. The negative particle at the front and the word for loving at the back are not in dispute. What sits between them has never been settled. One reading makes him the one who does not love light, which suits a book about a man who traded daylight for twenty-four years of appetite. Another reads it as not loving Faust, which is crueller and probably truer to the character. A third abandons Greek for Hebrew and proposes a destroyer and a slanderer welded together. A fourth points at the Latin for the poisonous stink that rises off standing water in caves. Four etymologies, no agreement, and a name that outlived all of them. By the seventeenth century it had drifted free of its own story, and Shakespeare could drop a form of it into a tavern scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor as a generic insult.

The contract in the 1587 book is drawn up like a piece of business, which is what gives it its chill. The devil undertakes three things: to serve for as long as the scholar lives, to answer whatever he is asked, and never to tell him a lie. Faust undertakes three in return: his body and soul at the end of twenty-four years, a signature in his own blood, and the renunciation of his faith. Read the devil’s third clause again. He is contractually bound to honesty, and it costs him nothing, because the truth is the most discouraging thing in his possession and his client has already stopped listening.

Christopher Marlowe understood that better than anyone who came after. In his play the thing appears first in a shape so hideous that Faustus sends it away and orders it to come back dressed as an old Franciscan friar, on the reasoning that a holy shape suits a devil best. Then Faustus asks him where hell is, and the friar tells him: here, in this room, in this conversation, because hell is not a place a damned spirit steps out of to run errands. He is in it while he stands there. Faustus hears the most honest warning ever given by a devil and advises him to show more backbone about it. Willard Farnham noticed the crucial thing about how Marlowe stages the summoning. Mephistophilis is not out walking the earth looking for a man to corrupt. He comes because the conjuration itself is proof that the conjuror is already in danger of damnation. Protestant writers of the late 1580s were arguing exactly this in print, that a magician’s spectacular commanding of spirits was theatre permitted from below, staged so the magician would damn himself more thoroughly while believing himself in charge.

Goethe took the same devil and gave him a better suit. His Mephistopheles arrives as a black poodle that follows two men home from an Easter walk, circling in rings that tighten with every pass, and in the study the dog swells and resolves into a travelling scholar. He introduces himself as the spirit that always denies, and then complicates it by admitting he is part of a power that keeps willing evil and keeps producing good. It is the most quotable self-description any devil has managed. It is also, in context, an excuse. The great comic flaw in his position appears at once: the protective sign chalked at the threshold has been drawn badly, with the point left slightly open, and that gap was wide enough to let him in but the rest of the figure will not let him out. He talks his way around it, sings the scholar to sleep, and sets a rat to gnaw the wood away. A devil with a rodent problem is still a devil, but he is a devil whose dignity is negotiable.

The German folk legends collected in the nineteenth century kept the bargain and quietly dropped the name. In them it is Faust who is famous, Faust who cheats at cards in Neu-Ruppin and is caught out because a dropped card reveals he has horse feet, Faust who flowers a winter garden at Boxberg Castle and lets the delighted guests raise their knives before showing them each holding a blade to a neighbour’s nose. The servant devil in those tellings is anonymous, or answers to something local. In the Dutch legend of Castle Waardenburg he is called Jost, and he is run so ragged by a master who scatters grain into thorn hedges and flour into the moat that after four years he asks to be let go and is refused. The literary devil got the elegant name. The folk devil got the work.

His powers all follow from what he is, which is an errand-runner with unlimited expenses. He shifts shape, he crosses countries in the time it takes to want to, he conjures fruit out of season and Helen of Troy out of the past, he escorts his client to the Brocken on Walpurgis Night where his horse’s foot is not an embarrassment but a credential. His limits follow just as neatly. He is a servant and not a prince, dispatched by Lucifer and answerable to him. He cannot enter a sign that has been drawn correctly. He cannot lie to the man he is bound to. He cannot take a soul that has not already been signed away, which means every impressive thing he does is a service rendered after the fact rather than a temptation that worked. And at the very end of Goethe’s second part, with the contract expired and the body cooling, he loses the prize outright because a flight of young angels scatters roses and he cannot stop staring at them. Not defeated. Distracted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mephistopheles?

Mephistopheles is the devil who serves Doctor Faust in the German Faust legend, acting as Lucifer’s messenger rather than as a ruler of hell in his own right. He first appears, spelled Mephostophiles, in an anonymous chapbook printed by Johann Spies at Frankfurt in 1587. Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both rewrote him, and Goethe’s version fixed both the modern spelling and the cold, witty personality most readers know.

Where does the name Mephistopheles come from?

The name was invented for the 1587 Faust chapbook and has no earlier history in demonology or magic. It appears to be a Renaissance coinage assembled from Greek and Latin elements, and scholars have proposed several readings without agreeing on one, including not loving light, not loving Faust, a Hebrew compound of destroyer and slanderer, and the Latin word for poisonous cave vapour. Because the name was made rather than inherited, it belongs to literature in a way that older demon names do not.

Is Mephistopheles the same as Satan or Lucifer?

No. Mephistopheles is a subordinate spirit who works for Lucifer and is sent to answer a summons, not the ruler of hell himself. The Faust texts are consistent on this point, with Mephistopheles reporting to a superior and negotiating on his behalf. He is a late arrival in the infernal hierarchy and never became part of the older tradition of magic and demonology.

What does Mephistopheles want from Faust?

Under the 1587 contract he wants Faust’s body and soul after twenty-four years, a signature written in blood, and the renunciation of Faust’s Christian faith. In exchange he serves for the whole of Faust’s remaining life, answers any question put to him, and is bound never to lie. He does not have to work at tempting Faust, because Faust had already made up his mind before the conjuring began.

How does Mephistopheles lose Faust’s soul in Goethe’s Faust?

At the end of the second part, angels scatter roses over the scene as they come for Faust, and Mephistopheles becomes so absorbed in the young angels that the soul is carried off while he is looking elsewhere. It is a comic failure rather than a defeat in argument or combat. Goethe gives him no grand last stand, only a lapse in attention at the one moment that mattered.

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Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, Demons, Familiar, Drude, Krampus, Erlking, Homunculus, Witch, Helen, Asmodeus, Samael, Azazel